Identity X (9 page)

“Ben,
stay behind the lift.”  Ben looked over his left shoulder, and then his right. 
He felt as if he had been touched by a person who had immediately disappeared,
like a person who swears they have seen or felt a ghost but have no physical
proof. 

“Ami,
are you...” She didn’t let him finish.

“Shut
up, there’s no time for this.  They are tracking this call.  Look behind the
plants on Mark’s left.  Recognise him?”  Ben looked out from behind the lift
and took a second glance.  This time he saw what Ami was referring to.  A man,
blond hair, wearing nothing but black.  He was sat motionless with his legs
crossed, with his foot dangling about in front of him and weighed down by a
heavy looking black boot.  It was the same familiar boot from the rooftops
earlier on that morning when he had been hiding for the first time behind the
flimsy broken door that offered zero protection.  His stare was fixed ahead at
the entrance to the cafe, but tucked behind the foliage to camouflage his
presence.  Just the sight of him made Ben’s shoulder hurt again, and he pressed
at it with the palm of his hand.  “He won’t kill you here, but they will take
you.”

“Does
he have Hannah?”

“Sssshhhh,
listen.  Do exactly as I say.  Call Mark.  Tell him there is a change of plan
and you are across the city.  Tell him to meet you at Twenty Second Street. 
Then hang up.  I told you trust nobody.  But do this, and then trust yourself. 
The next move is up to you.”  She hung up the telephone, not leaving him time
to answer. 

She
spoke at such a rate that the words slipped from her tongue as if oil coated to
the point that he could barely grip them or begin to comprehend all that she
had said.  Was the shooter now tracking Mark?  Had he made it to the
laboratory, and then been followed here? 
They must be using him as a lure,
the bastards.
  Ami was trying to warn them.   He had to take her advice. 
He held up his telephone and tried to tuck himself deeper into the foliage of
the leaves, and then dialled Mark’s number.  His palm was sweaty and damp as he
stayed behind the cover like a soldier peering out through the bushes, just
keeping Mark’s table in view.  He did as Ami had told him to do and kept the
call short.  He gave Mark the exact instructions as Ami had relayed to him, and
hung up the telephone without explanation.  With any luck Mark would just walk
away and lead the other man away with him.  Ben kept his eye on the man in
black, yet was distracted by the constant taste of salt from his top lip
trickling into his mouth and making him even thirstier for the refreshments
that sat so closely at hand.  The shooters interest had been spiked, that was
for sure.  Ben watched as Mark put his telephone back down on the table.  He
looked confused and angry as he rested his forehead into his hands.  He looked
to be breathing heavily and seemed frustrated, momentarily bubbling over into a
flash of anger as he struck his fist against the cold plastic of the cafe
table.  A few people witnessed his outburst, and they turned to look his way. 
One of them was the shooter.  He was watching Mark and waiting for him to make
a move. 
Would he follow him
?  Just as Ben was beginning to regret his
decision to follow Ami’s advice and involve his friend even more by having him
followed to a part of town where nobody of sound mind and disposition would
willingly go, something unexpected happened that made him change his mind. 
Mark stood up, but he didn’t leave.  Instead he clicked his fingers, and the
man dressed head to toe in deathly black stood up and walked over to him,
obedient as a Labrador to the call of his master.  They stood together talking
for a moment, and Mark picked up his telephone again.  Ben could feel his
buzzing in his hand, and his astonishment was sufficient to unsteady his feet
and rock the plant behind which he was crouching.  It was Mark.

Ben
silenced the telephone and stared at the screen.  Had he really just seen Mark
talk to that man?  The same man that had tried to kill him only an hour
before.  What was he doing here?  Mark had been his friend for years.  They had
studied together, socialised together, and cried together.  It had been Mark
who Ben had called first on the night when the doctors explained to his mother
that they should not expect his father to live to see the dawn break the
following day.  The pneumonia was severe, and he was weak.  There was nothing
more that he could do.  He had died on that unusually hot night in early May.  It
was only a month before Ben’s eighteenth birthday.  Mark had stood outside the
door.  He had waited in the corridor surrounded by the pungent smell of perfume
that his mother continuously sprayed to marginally mask the smell of human
waste.  He had sat on the small plastic chair scuffing the floor with his toes
with his elbows propped up on his knees, his kindly face full of faith and hope
that everything would be alright.  They both grew up that night when they sat
together outside on the porch steps, the tracks of Ben’s tears illuminated like
effervescent mountain streams by a gleaming white moonlight.  It had been a
long, slow lesson for Ben, and Mark had lived it with him.  As they sat there,
it was the first time that they both had tangible proof that life never stays
the same, and that nothing and nobody lasts forever.

Ben
wanted to answer the call and tell him that he knew he had double crossed him,
but he was no fool.  He knew that if he answered that call and told him what he
knew that Mark would know he was here, and right now Ben had no idea of Mark’s
capabilities.  He slid the telephone back into his pocket, and folded his body
into the shadow of the lift.  He watched as Mark, followed by the would-be
killer left the café.  They walked directly towards the lift, and Ben
could feel his pulse starting to hammer along to a faster beat.  They came only
a metre away from him, a concrete wall the only thing between them.  He could
hear their mumbled voices from where he crouched.

“I’m
going to go to Twenty Second Street.  Did you find her yet?”  Mark spoke to his
killing machine with venom laced words, spitting them out like a bad taste. 
Ben had never heard this hateful tone in Mark’s voice.  Mark was the one in
control here.  He wasn’t scared at all.

“No
Sir.  We are still looking.”

“She’ll
find him.  Find her, and follow her.  We’ll find him.”

“Yes
Sir.  What about Catherine?”  Ben pressed his hands against the solid concrete
panel that separated them from him. 
Who is Catherine? 
He didn’t know
any Catherine.  His options flashed through his mind like bolts of lightning as
they raced through a storm rich sky.  Should he let himself be taken too? 
Would he find Hannah and Matthew that way?

“She
wasn’t to know.  Leave her to do her job.”  With that, Ben heard the ping of
the lift as the doors opened.  The two men walked inside, which muffled their
words to the point of incomprehension.  Ben heard the doors close and his legs
buckled beneath him as the immediate danger passed, and for the second time today
he found himself sat on a cold concrete floor contemplating what the hell was
going on.  Ami was right, he really couldn’t trust anybody.  The only person
that had helped him so far was Ami.  He had no choice but to call her.

“Yes?” 
She waited for him to speak.

“Ami,
I’m ready to meet you.”  He already understood that he would receive no
explanation over the telephone. 

“Good. 
Meet me at the park behind Seventy Fourth.  I’m waiting.”

Ben had never been to
Seventy Fourth Street before, or the
park behind it.  He had heard of it because he knew that from this road led
another small road, a dead end that led to nowhere.  At the far end of the road
sat a regal building which had been standing for over two hundred years.  Its
beauty was celebrated, especially at night when the rows of purple blooming
Paulownias were illuminated and romanticised by the delicate light of the
ancient street lamps.  The building once stood as a palatial home of a local aristocrat,
who alongside his own home had built a series of coach houses where his
servants lived.  These coach houses lined a small road that arose from Seventy
Fourth Street and now did nothing more than guild the walkway to the square and
hide its beauty away from the rest of the city like a beautiful but veiled
face, there but unseen.  This place of beauty had been left to its own devices,
and much like love, after a period without care, attention, or somebody to
nurture it, became less than precious and eventually forgotten until it was
past the point of recovery.  History would regale how this road was purpose
built to carry horse drawn coaches many years before the advent of the car, but
which now carried only feet towards a crumbling backdrop of long lost
decadence.  He didn’t much care for being here, and couldn’t for the life of
him think why Ami would arrange to meet him in this place.  The thought that
this dead end could in fact be a trap rose poisonously in his mind like air
pockets escaping from a stagnant quagmire, inserting doubt upon pre-existing
doubt, cairns set to lead him in the wrong direction.  He acknowledged this
brief moment of hesitation, but found himself accepting the fact that he had no
other option, and so despite his fears steeled himself for the moments ahead.

He
turned from Seventy Fourth Street and into the narrow lane.  Above him were
rows of poorly constructed coach houses, abandoned and no longer in use. 
Newspapers dating from over twenty years ago had been pasted to the windows in
several layers, the deepest of which were peeling and yellow from the heat of
the sun and ground with dust and grime.  Before him stood the beautiful regal
building, decorated with ornate iron balustrades covering the base of the long
oversized windows.  Underneath the Paulownias there were a series of benches
that sat empty and looked rickety and partly rotten.  As he approached, he saw
that the park opened out to the left and to the right forming a T shape with
the narrow lane that led up to it.  On his first look he couldn’t see anybody. 
He was stood beneath the trees, heavily laden with buds that looked set to
burst into bloom as the temperature would surely rise next month, coaxing them
out.  There was no wind here, and it felt immediately warmer surrounded by the
height of the buildings proudly standing tall, unashamed of their atrophy and
disrepair.  He was suddenly hit by an overwhelming desire to bring Hannah here,
and to sit with her on the benches beneath the blossoming trees.  In his vision
they wouldn’t speak, only sit together, needing nothing more than each other’s
company and the sight of Matthew playing at their feet.  In his visions Matthew
remained an eternal toddler, short of words and rich in love and awe for his
father.  It was only as he saw Matthew in his mind’s eye today, that he
realised his reflections were always from the past, every vision born of a time
before Bionics. 

He
was snatched back into reality as he heard Ami whisper his name.  As he turned
to the direction of the voice he saw her stood in the corner of the square. 
She was tucked into the shadow of the great building, and she motioned for him
to sit.  He sat as instructed onto the bench which was facing away from her,
but he turned and gripped the panels of brittle and splintered wood in
anticipation of her approach, his eyes never once leaving her face.

Ami
waited hesitantly for a moment, seconds ticking by at a pace which felt as if
time had become stationary, until she eventually took her first steps towards
him.  He could see her indecision in her cautious steps and in the way that her
eyes darted left and right, occasionally looking back over her shoulder.  For a
moment Ben was sure that he had seen a man dart back into the shadows of the
building behind Ami, but as she approached he soon found himself completely
focussed on her presence, remembering why he was here and forgetting anything
else.  Just before she sat down next to him she took a deep and fortifying
breath, and he wondered why it was that she looked so fitful and apprehensive. 
He followed her with his eyes, and as she sat he turned to face her.  His leg
and arm muscles were braced and ready to run like a watched gazelle in the
African bush, aware he was being watched but still anxiously waiting, fearful
that any quick and sudden departure could render him vulnerable and exposed.

Her
long casual hair that he had admired on so many occasions was wrapped neatly
into a bun behind her head, and she was wearing a long Macintosh that swung
freely and draped open as she sat.  For the first time that he could remember
she was wearing trousers.  She appeared different from his memory, beautiful
still, but rather than the softly painted vision that he kept close in his
mind, it was a harder edged reality in which she appeared sharply focused and
dangerous. 

“Ben,
there isn’t much time.  You have to listen to me carefully.”

“Hang
on Ami.”  This was his first chance to try to find out what the hell was going
on, and if there wasn’t much time he sure as hell wasn’t going to hand it
straight over to her.  “Before you start, I need to ask you something.”

“No
Ben.  You need to listen.”  This woman looked like Ami, but for the first time
he could detect a slight accent in her voice.  It reminded him of Mr. Saad, the
man who was trying to fund his continued research programme.  This was the
first time she had demanded anything.

“No,
no.  Ami wait.  Listen.  I have to ask you some things.”

“There
will be a time for your questions but it isn’t now.  At the moment your
questions will get us both killed.”  He didn’t interrupt her again and he sat
with his arms obediently dropped into his lap, his muscles limp and helpless,
sun melted candles, leaves starved of water.  “Ben, everything that has
happened to you over the last few hours was not supposed to happen.  It should
already be over.  We are only lucky that it is not.”  Ben’s mouth dropped open
in shock. 
Lucky?
  He didn’t feel too damn lucky.  “You should already
be dead.”

“I
know that.  Somebody tried to shoot me at the lab.”

“I’m
not referring to the lab.  You were never supposed to wake up today.  They
started it much quicker than I anticipated.  If I had known I would have found
a way to tell you at the bar.”

“What
bar?  What did they start?  Anyway, who are
they
?”  Ami wasn’t making
much sense to him.  “Is this about Mark?”

“Ben,
who do you think you work for?”

“Bionics.”

“You
work for the government.  Bionics is just the public face of the Office of
Scientific Weaponry Development.  OSWED.”

“The
government?”

“Yes,
but not the one you see on the television, or in the newspaper.  It’s the same
one, but it’s the side of it that nobody knows about.”

“Ami
there is only one government.”

“That’s
what I just said.  There is the government that you see, the one that stands up
and leads the country with clean hands, the one that can deny that certain
things ever happened because they don’t even know about it.  They are public
puppets.  They are the ones that don’t have to lie.  Then there are the rest of
us.  The people that nobody knows about.  The people that do what you might
call
dirty work
.”

“Ami,
you’re a scientist.”

“Correct. 
But I don’t work for you.  I work for OSWED.  They are supposed to be the
people that keep you safe.  It’s supposed to be about intelligence and
development.  They believe it is what makes your Great Country so great.” Ben
could hear a certain level of sarcasm coming through in her newly accented
voice.  “We work outside of standard military intelligence.  We don’t exist, at
least as far as the rest of the world knows.  That counts for the rest of the
staff at Bionics.”

“You’re
telling me that I work for a secret government agency, and that all of the
staff I work with knew nothing about it except for you?  What have you done
with them?  What happened to my research?”

“NO. 
Start paying attention Ben.  You’re the only one that doesn’t know anything
about it.  Why do you think the lab and all of the staff have disappeared?  The
mission was complete.  Your theory had been proven and NEMREC worked.”  She
could detect the surprise on his face, the inability to understand as his mouth
hung limply open.  She wished that she could spare him the details, but she had
to be honest.  If ever there was a time it was now.  “You were already supposed
to be dead.”

“What
the hell!”

“They
knew how good you were.  They targeted you.  They knew you would succeed so
they started to control everything about you.  They wanted your brilliance in
the palm of their hand, and they did everything they could to get it.  Your
friends, your wife, your whole life.  It’s a set up Ben.  It was all about
getting NEMREC.  You did it.  They don’t need you anymore.”

“You’re
saying my whole life is a set up?  That’s bullshit Ami!”  He was up and off the
bench now, arms flailing like compliant branches in the wind without any
control over their own movement. 
Who the hell does she think she is?
 
Mark? 
Hannah?  Matthew?  She had to be lying
.

“It’s
not bullshit.  It’s the truth.  It’s the first truthful thing you have heard in
years.  You discovered how to change people’s DNA Ben.  You know what they can
do with that kind of knowledge.”  She was up on her feet now too, trying to
make contact with him and reaching out for his arms as he span around,
propelled by the inertia of disbelief.

“I’m
trying to cure disease, Ami not make weapons for your government.”

“Your
government, Ben.  You might not be trying to make weapons but OSWED are.  They
want the ability to change DNA to build a stronger army.  An elite force.  They
don’t want to manufacture pharmaceuticals to cure Huntington’s disease like you
do.  They want to make a stronger army and build weapons.  They want people to
be their weapons, and you have given them everything they need.” 

“And
you?”  He was stood still staring straight at her.  “Why are you helping me if
you work for them?”  She sat down onto the bench, her head bowed.  For a moment
he thought he could see tears forming in her dark almond eyes.

“I
want what you want, Ben.”  She turned her head up to look at him, and her eyes
looked swollen and set to burst.  “My father is dying.  So am I.  I want a
chance to live to grow old.”  The pain in her face, in her blurry eyes and
crumpled brow was a feeling that he recognised.  He understood the feelings
that she described, and he felt them every day in every one of his mutated
cells.  Her words could have been his own, his own feelings, his own hopes, his
own aspirations.  Any fears he had, any caution for the woman before him had
passed.  He saw his own reflection in her glassy eyes as he contemplated her
sadness and regret.  It softened him and he sensed the need for truth and
trust, believing in the freedom and strength that it offered.

“Ami,
why am I not dead already?”

“I
don’t know.  You should be.  What she gave you should have been enough to kill
you?”

“What
who gave me?”  He saw that same sense of pity on her face, as she wiped away a
tear from her cheek.  He traced his thoughts back to when he passed out on his
settee, how he assumed he had merely been drunk, and how he had been dragged up
the stairs, and how he had slept for thirty six hours, and how he had been
sick, and how it was still there the next morning, and the next morning, and
how Hannah hadn’t been home.  Suddenly he had visions of her as a spy carrying
a gun and speaking in Russian on a foreign mission and seducing people to steal
data chips, right before he reminded himself that the explanation that he had
conjured up seemed utterly ridiculous.  Yet still he said it.  “You think
Hannah tried to kill me?”

“No Ben. 
I know she tried to kill you.   She poured you champagne, it was drugged. 
That’s why you feel so awful now.”  She sat down on the bench, steadying
herself, and attempting also to steady Ben, hoping that their current
connection was enough to pull him towards her.  Skin on skin, a real
connection.  She knew they had felt it before, and she hoped he felt it now.

“I
threw up.”  He thought back to the pile of sick on the floor and couldn’t
remember ever being so pleased that he had been ill.  He tried again to remind
himself of the absurdity of her accusations, but found that the more time that
passed and the more he listened to himself, the dismissal of her theory didn’t
seem quite so easy.

“Then
that’s why you’re still here.”

“Ami. 
What do they want from me?”

“They
want you dead, Ben.  It’s their only aim.  To them,” she paused apologetically
before she finished her sentence, “you already are.  There is no record of your
life anymore.  It’s not like you died, it’s like you never existed.”